Today is the 17th birthday of the Original Xbox! What are your favourite games from this system?

I'm going for chronological order here because I can't pick my #1 right now.

November 15, 2001 - Halo: Combat Evolved

I loved this game on the Xbox and it's one of the titles I'll still bust out from time to time, particularly for its fun ass split-screen multiplayer modes. It also helps that I have a good time playing through the campaign. For it's time the audio and visual elements are as detailed as I've ever seen (at the time.) Bungie has brought to the Xbox the game that will prove hundreds of thousands of naysayers wrong (about the system and the game) Microsoft isn't some 'boring office computer software company' they're a video game company as well. Halo on Xbox is one of the best things to happen in video games.

February 22, 2002 - Jet Set Radio: Future

What original Xbox game had the best soundtrack in the mid-2000's? Halo: Combat Evolved Jet Set Radio: Future of course! The controls may not be as tight and responsive as the Tony Hawk games but that's just one setback to an amazing... extreme sports game? platforming game? Whatever the genre this game I don't care, I love it. I love the art style, I love the music (obviously), I love the simple but goofy plot with the characters that revolve around it. This game might've encouraged me to wear a pair of rollerblades and learn how to ride those things. I obviously failed.

June 17, 2003 - Midtown Madness 3

When Simon says... "What's the best exclusive racing game on the original Xbox?" People will say, Forza Motorsport or RalliSport Challenge or RalliSport Challenge 2 or Project Gotham Racing 2 and they're all great games for the system. But my answer. Midtown Madness 3. Yes, I do acknowledge that the single player story is cringeworthy but I still love it. This game is so fucking fun especially in online multi-player and that's where this game shines. I'll never forget the hours of beating my sister in every race in split-screen and finding secret paint jobs in the game's two open worlds of Washington D.C. and Paris.

November 17, 2003 - Need for Speed: Underground

Did I ever tell you how frustrating and anger inducing the A.I. rubber-banding is in races? That feeling pre-relief when you're in first place and about to cross the finish line but then you hit an oncoming car and your opponents who were miles behind just swoop right past you and take your place. Then you restart the race again, and again and again and you keep in failing until you just give up and throw your controller into the wall and fucking scream your lungs out?! That's how I feel playing this game and despite all of that... I love this game to bits.

September 8, 2004 - Burnout 3: Takedown

This is my favourite game of all time.

That's it, that's all I have to say about Burnout 3.

This is just 5 games out of the hundreds I've played and I'm sure there's plenty games I've missed that you played. I hope you can tell me about it here.

Fable 1

I freaking loved Advent Rising.

Knights of the Old Republic was really the first RPG I ever played, and it was such an incredible experience. Before I only really played action and sports games, and never really knew about RPGs. I was a pretty casual gamer until the Xbox generation. That's when I really started broadening the types of games I played, and KOTOR was a big catalyst in that.

Halo Combat Evolved is definitely up there, it's the reason I bought the system.

October 12, 2004- Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders

There aren't many games like this out there. Firstly, it's an medieval fantasy rts, you're controlling units of spearmen, archers, cavalry, swordsmen, orcs, ogres, vampires and weird things like dragons and those big elephant things from Stephen King's The Mist.

But one of your infantry units contains your commander, and when it gets into a fight, you control your commander in dynasty warriors style combat. You can still switch out of it and control your units rts style, and leave the fight to auto resolve, but there are benefits to controlling the action. You can kill units faster, or even break their morale by personally killing the enemy unit leaders.

The plot is also kind of interesting, since it plays out sequentially across 4 campaigns, 2 on the human side, 2 on the monster side, which each side having access to completely different units and each of the 4 characters you play controlling completely differently.

It had a sequel called Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes that was basically an expansion pack but not as good. Then they made Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom for the 360, a subpar dungeon/loot grind.

Oh and I almost forgot, the soundtrack is metal as fuck. This is the mission briefing music, the mission briefing music. (I'd embed it but giantbomb is saying it doesn't know what youtube is).

EDIT: Here's another track where the composer just starts shredding.

Like a lot of people, the Xbox was where I went after the demise of our beloved Dreamcast (RIP). Games like Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Shenmue 2 were so important to me. Hell, even Gunvalkyrie was a weird, cool thing. I miss those kinds of games.

Funny enough, my favorite Xbox game was Morrowind. I was a big console RPG fan (so JRPGs mostly), had never heard of it, but on a whim grabbed it out of some bargain bin, and really just fell deeply in love. I played it before I got a PC, and it pretty much blew my mind and opened me up to a lot of future PC RPGs, once I actually got a computer. (Including much more Morrowind on PC, with mods and all that fun.) Met most my internet friends at the time on a Morrowind forum, too.

Beyond that, KOTOR 1 and 2 were games I replayed multiple times and loved, as well as THUG1.

Really, I suppose I didn't have that many Xbox games, overall, and spent the majority of my time on PS2, and later PC, but I'll always give props to Xbox for the time I spent playing Morrowind on it.

I bought the original Xbox specifically to play Jet Set Radio Future. I sold it shortly after and got a PS2 because it had more games I was interested in.. but Jet Set really blew my mind at the time and I had a blast with it.

That said - nicely formatted first post!

Halo CE, Max Payne, and both KOTOR's stand out the most in my memory. Project Gotham Racing too.

Halo is the only one, because I only ever played the original Xbox once with a friend, when we visited a store with a demo station/kiosk. It's a great memory though, because we stood there playing for an hour or two, without anyone interrupting us.

Never owned an original Xbox, but I have plenty of fond memories playing Halo 2 with friends. It was the first "real" FPS I'd been introduced to after years of playing mediocre 007 games on the Gamecube, so it holds a formative place in my gaming tastes. Similarly, while I ended up playing it for myself on PC, I was introduced to Knights of the Old Republic on a cousin's Xbox, a game that's directly responsible for getting me into western-style RPGs.

On a more modern note, I played Ninja Gaiden Black last year and it turns out that game is still pretty damn awesome.

CounterStrike.... lol dunno why I played so much but I really did.

• Jade Empire
• NFL 2K5
• Ninja Gaiden
• Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition
• Halo 2

Some of my other faves already mentioned. Good times on the Xbox!

All I played on my OG Xbox was Halo, Crimson Skies, Fable, KOTOR, and MechAssault.

Then I sold it and switched to PC gaming exclusively for awhile. Kinda wish I had kept the hardware now, but with back compat I can play most of those games anyway.

Quantum Redshift, baby!

FULL DISCLOSURE:

The Xbox was my jam! I got back into games after my teenage years were behind me, and I played A LOT of Xbox during my engagement and early marriage. I’m bias as hell toward this wonderful massive machine.

Bangers:

Halo

Halo 2

Crimson Skies

KOTOR

KOTOR 2

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

Rainbow Six 3

Ghost Recon

Shenmue 2

Fable

Midtown Madness 3

Phantom Dust

Mech Assault

Full Spectrum Warrior

Panzer Dragoon Orta

Metal Gear Solid 2

DOA3

DOA2:Ultimate

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Max Payne

Max Payne 2

Jet Set Radio Future

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

Freedom Fighters

Mercenaries

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Brothers in Arms: The Road to Hill 30

Def Jam: Fight for NY

Morrowind

Chronicles of Riddick

NFL 2k5

Fight Night Round 3

Indigo Prophecy

Jade Empire

Ninja Gaiden Black

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good:

Steel Battalion

Sniper Elite

Republic Commando

Sudeki

Stubbs the Zombie

Tomb Raider: Legend

Project Gotham Racing

Project Gotham Racing 2

SSX Tricky

Tenchu

Indiana Jones

Spiderman 2

Unreal Championship

Psychonauts

Xmen Legends

Gunvalkyre

Deathrow

Otogi

Otogi 2

Breakdown

Galleon

Hitman 2

Also Pretty Cool, but Not Setting the World Aflame:

Hunter: The Reckoning

Grabbed by the Ghoulies

Enclave

Kung Fu Chaos

Dark Void

Armed and Dangerous

Bloodrayne 2

Dead to Rights

Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat

Halo is my absolute favorite gaming franchise of all time so Halo CE and 2 were easily my favorite games on the console. Besides that it also introduced me to rpgs and online gaming. KOTOR and Morrowind were the first RPGs that I ever played that actually clicked for me and made the genre make sense. Before those two games I basically just dismissed the entire genre as dumb

Ninja Gaiden, KOTOR, Morrowind, Halo, DOA3, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future... the list goes on and these are just the exclusives.

I was lucky enough to own all the consoles of that generation and I think I spent the most time on the Xbox, although I have fond memories with all of them. (even the Dreamcast)

Halo: Combat Evolved and Morrowind are two of my all-time five, but I'll actually shout out another title:

Project Gotham Racing 2.

I maintain that it's one of those racing games whose DNA you can still see extremely clearly in modern releases--from Kudos system clones to handling physics and accessibility features. It's a game that wanted casual players to get better at the craft of playing racing games, teaching them how to do it with subtle, gamified tutorializations as opposed to sterile instructional videos. Or, as was more common with genre peers of its time, just leaving the player hanging to figure it out themselves. Which basically never worked.

PGR 2 is a genre masterpiece, in my opinion. And it was one of the best reasons to ever own an Xbox.

KOTOR - Easy pick for me.

@nutter: what a fucking list of games good sir!

The Xbox was a killer console with loads of great games, I loved it. So many fond memories, so many lan parties. Favourites include -

Dead or Alive

Ghost Recon

Midtown Madness

Fable

Shenmue 2

Splinter Cell 1-3

Max Payne

Jade empire

KOTOR

Brothers in arms

But without a doubt the top two games for this system are -

#2 - halo 2. Holy fuck, talk about your online shooters. Aside from overwatch, nothing comes close to this bad boy. Litteral, thousands of hours spent on this.

#1 - halo CE. The GOAT of FPS games right here.

Midtown Madness 3 is one of my favorite online games ever. Hunter, Stayaway and even just Cruise were so much fun. The online community was fantastic. Just a bunch of people who loved crashing cars into each other.

KOTOR, Ninja Gaiden, or Splinter Cell, can't decide

@frodobaggins: Halo 2 is probably my least favorite Bungie Halo, but that game was still exceptional.

The online couch co-op experience was like something from the future. I remember thinking all games would handle the online experience like Halo 2. It took several years for folks to come close to playing catch-up.

From the launch of the system, to marquee games like Halo, KOTOR, Ninja Gaiden, and Splinter Cell, to the launch of Xbox Live, and the future vision of online play in Halo 2, that console was an amazing experience.

@nutter: that's a great list. Add kingdom under fire and that covers pretty much everything.

@darkmoney52: Man, I wanted to include Kingdom Under Fire, but I don’t remember it well enough. I probably typed and deleted it a few times.

I remember digging it. I remember lots of metal, a handful of heros for brawling and some amount of commanding units from the ground. I should watch some videos and try to remember it better.

I LOVED the original Xbox at the time, but I feel like I bought into a narrative that it was vastly overshadowed by the PS2. I think they were both very different, very strong machines.

I have extremely fond memories of playing NCAA Football 2004. My friend picking Michigan, me picking USC and bombing it to Mike Williams every other play.

The game had an interesting mechanic where it would score the game and if it was high enough it would make a top 10. You could go back and review the game: review the box score and stats. That was pretty cool.

I picked up the game two weeks ago and my friend and I are going to have a reunion game soon.

And obviously Halo.

Haven't played a game on an Xbox, though have played ports of some of those games.
Halo CE.
... actually that's it, besides the main game i'll mention, still playing the PC version to this day.